


Like a River that Don't Know Where It's Flowin' (I Took a Wrong Turn and I Just Kept Going)

by pmlsidelines



Category: Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types
Genre: AU, Age Difference, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anal Play, Blow Jobs, Dirty Talk, Facial, Fingering, Hand Job, Hannigram - Freeform, Lap Sitting, M/M, Pearl Necklace, Twink Will, WIP, lots of booty play aw yis, mechanic AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-04-06
Updated: 2014-04-06
Packaged: 2018-01-18 10:08:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1424587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pmlsidelines/pseuds/pmlsidelines
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There was Will, 19 and blossoming. He just knew,in his marrow in his molecules, that the exquisitely beautiful fae-like creature in front of him was undeniably, unselfconsciously, the best looking, the best smelling, no doubt the best tasting thing in this town, Baltimore, the world. </p><p>Will is a 19 year old mechanic, Hannibal is a thirtysomething car owner with faulty transmission.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like a River that Don't Know Where It's Flowin' (I Took a Wrong Turn and I Just Kept Going)

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by "Hungry Heart" by Bruce Springsteen, and this: http://halfhardtorock.tumblr.com/post/51641031735/hugh-dancy-in-tempo-2003-i-have-never-seen
> 
> First of all: thank you so, so, so much to everyone who sent me kind messages regarding the first draft of this story. I cannot even begin to describe how happy those comments and messages have helped me. 
> 
> So anyway -- first work in this fandom. If you have any comments, good or bad, direct 'em on over to adieuordie.tumblr.com. Hope you enjoy! x

It was September, bleeding in to October, when they first met. Neither had any clue, not the slightest idea, what they’d be getting themselves in to.  
At first they didn’t much care. Between the roaring course of blood so loud in their ears and the flint-spark of initial attraction there wasn’t much time to. 

That Fall, Will was 19, glowing, still a boy but so much of him a man. So rosy cheeked and wide eyed, so readily arched and loose-spined.

He was one of the those grease under the nails kind of guys; there was always some kind of dirt, mud or oil on him, or his clothes, and it never seemed to come off. He wore checked shirts, always buttoned up wrong, always with a tiny keyhole of skin visible, wife beater vests that betrayed him and showed some of the light smattering of fine hairs that grew on his chest like wires, and low slung, obscene jeans that hung just right: boy was he a find.

Of course, that’s what his mother had always said, combing his sweetly curling hair away from his face and admiring the decidedly masculine set of his jaw. _“You can be anything you want with a face like that,”_ she’d coo, comforting and motherly and everything nice, _“but you know daddy and I would prefer if you went to college.”_  
Unfortunately, his dad, the kindly curly haired man that gave William his name and gentle Louisianan twang never got to saw him further his education. 

In end, after high school and the summer he spent mourning the loss of his father (fishing was a popular past time that August,) and the letters that arrived from the best institutions in the country ( _“Oh my God, honey, you got in there, too?!”_ ) he had already figured out that his mom couldn’t afford it, and that at the end of the day he wanted to stay near her for a while. He put off applications, gave himself another year, and lost himself in his second-hometown, Wolf Trap, Virginia. 

Wolf Trap. Dusky, milky-starlit Wolf Trap. 

There was something magical about the woods around his family home. When he was a child he could feel it. On cold winter mornings when he’d nervously walk the dogs through thick country frost, he’d always look back at the house. It was small, sure, but it was just the three of them (well, five with the dogs) and warm and cosy and familiar. He always thought, smiling kind of wry at the memory, that the lights of his house were always yellow, romantic like lanterns along the Seine. In his childhood Will had been something of a romantic, but he also spent too much time in his head. 

On lonelier nights when he’d turn back to the house to make sure it hadn't floated away, he’d sigh, breath like bubbles floating toward the surface and try to make sense of it all. With most of his friends scattered across the country, he needed the anchor that small town life provided him, and though he had a couple of friends left he couldn't help but watch TV or go see a movie and not want what everybody else had; a brain that turned off at lights out and a girl or _someone_ to call his own. 

He liked girls. They smelt nice, looked nice, giggled nice. They were complex, maddening.  
He liked them. Some girls from his high school were his closest friends, and though Alana was miles away, going through a pot smoking, everything-is-a-conspiracy phase, he still missed her like crazy.

Beverly was still around – like him she needed money before college, so had no choice but to stay at home. Beverley was great. Beverly was also great at the whole secret keeping thing. Junior year, when Will kissed shy quarterback Brian Zeller (and early exploration in to bisexuality), Bev had stuck her tongue out in Mathelete influenced disgust and squawked “Zeller? Yeller beller Zeller, really? Gross, Graham, we’ll never be friends again,” but they were. They always have been.

Since his brush with the shyest guy in the universe (Zeller’s hands had been shaking when he raked his fingers over Will’s chest, about as far as they ever got before Brian lived up to his Yeller Beller nickname,) Will had felt like the grey area, the fuzziness between boys and girls and himself, had only gotten greyer and more confusing. Truth was, boy, girl, who cares? Will found both as terrifying and beautiful as the other. Hisexuality was a pendulum swing haphazardly moving between the two with such speed he never knew what he wanted from a relationship anyway. 

College, he thought. College would be where he could try it out, like a hat or something. Will knew he was cute _“boy you’re a find”_ ricocheted around his often, and since working at the auto shop he’d filled out. Add that the couple dozen sit ups he’d do when he was bored, and well, he was kind of a man now. He didn’t know a lot about gay clubs, but he knew Baltimore had a few cool ones and at 26 miles away he could do worse until he went to George Washington University. For the moment the (slightly ironic) sexual liberation the nation’s capital offered him was too far away. 

When he got to college he’d try all kinds of new things – maybe join a team if his occasional social anxiety didn’t get in the way, or maybe a fraternity or something, but only if he could spare the time. Criminology was going to be hard for him in every sense, but if it meant he could use his abilities for a good cause he knew it was worth it all. Behind the bluish-grey eyes that always saw too much and a mind that knew too intimately, Will was pretty good at concealing every nervous tickle that inevitably brushed along his shoulders whenever he watched the local news or scanned local papers for his most unsavoury interests. Since childhood he’d just…known things. He knew why people did things before they did and later he’d know what they’d do before a hand was even raised. Reading through papers he understood things that cops and reporters couldn’t, knowing the answers to grisly questions at a molecular level. 

Criminology and the artistry of crime was under the blue vein and ruddy redness of his skin. The cracked blood and plasma of death ran cold through every nerve; it was inescapable. Perhaps that was why he worked on cars as his stop gap: they engaged his brain and chased away the dark.  
The roar of the engine was usually enough to drown out the black. 

It was something in the sleekness maybe, or the long lines and curves of a car that indicated top quality design in every possibility. Cars were the perfect marriage of safety and power, simplicity and incredible complexity. They were easy to understand, just like people. To Will, there wasn’t much difference between the two. His unique condition/curse ( _“Don’t ever call understanding a curse, William,” his father would chide,_ ) allowed him unparalleled ‘understanding’ in to the human mind, and he hated it, but it also made work hard. 

Fixing up BMW’s meant coming in to contact with a lot of wealthy types. That’s the problem with beemers, they’re a gateway car. You buy one because you got a bit of money, then when you get a bit more you buy a Merc. At least the auto shop he worked for was nice and clean, plus the girl behind the counter was kind of cute. The mechanics had a good laugh with each other, and though Will was a spritely 19 year old, they got all their teasing _“balls dropped yet?”_ out of the way in the first few months.  
In the four months that Will had been there, he’d hadn’t had a girlfriend, significant other or even a real ride or die friend, but the centrefold-as-wallpaper they had in a corner of the office made him feel like a man at least, and the guys teased him out of misplaced fraternal fondness.

This, this incredible concoction of spirit already on the move but body grounded, is what greeted a thirtysomething, more like late thirties, man on one chilly autumnal morning. His old car, the stupid BMV with its annoying heat settings and CD changer and forever wrong navigation, had finally wheezed in to old age, and was in desperate need of fixing. He didn’t really care about it – he would get rid of it soon enough, but he at least needed it to get him back to base in Baltimore. His house was empty, cold in its richness, and the conference that had forced him away had been boring but he longed for home cooked comforts and a warm familiar bed.  
When he pulled in, tyres objecting and steering wheel squeaking, he had wanted to get in and get out. Spend a couple of hours maybe, sit down and go through notes from the conference, ask for and get most likely turned down for an Earl Grey. Talking to the pretty face of the receptionist, Ruby (such a warm name) he was glad to know that the shop’s most capable mechanic would be dealing with it. The surroundings were borderline unacceptable, but Hannibal knew how to adapt, knew how to hide the plain disgust that was always just under the surface.

For the next hour he looked through the reception, out across the cars and bikes that were being fixed, and was struck by the mechanic’s office. Inside there were 3 fat men, two bald, huddled around a television watching some wretched cartoon about another fat bald man. Irony. He made small talk, just to fill the room with the personality it so obviously lacked. He listened intently as Ruby told him all about the comings and goings of Wolf Trap, a small ideal which seemed to have all the trappings of a dusky and nostalgic America which he’d always believed to be a lie. In Wolf Trap people don’t lock their doors at night, even though they know what snakes slither quietly in the dark. That was a piece of information he’d have to pass on. As she spoke, eyes alight with town pride but voice dull with affected apathy, Hannibal listened and smiled where needed, coppery grey hair falling in his eyes in a way he imagined Ruby would enjoy, just so he see the faint flush of her cheeks, just to read the signs of textbook interest. The body had always bored him, but its reactions betrayed the complexities of the human mind. In his earlier years he might have flirted if only to see where the girl would bend, how far he could take it…but now he only did it out of boredom and for the sport of it all. When she asked him about where he had come from and the notes he was writing so furiously, he let a wide grin take over his face as he told her all about the conference; he didn’t care enough about her or this town to be kind, so the conference was recounted in nauseating detail, all roads leading back to mudermurdermurder and grisly details…

Further away, just out of sight but not out of earshot, was William. He looked over, concerned with how close the receptionist and customer or whoever the dude in the black slacks was, were standing – but then he heard the conversation. That guy, he-he- was talking about criminology, a conference on the practises of _serial killers_ and their minds and the damage they do and how to stop them and – he could feel his ears getting pink, even though the sound of that guy’s accented English was a mere bubbling froth of sound, faint but full of a kind of promise…

A small sound behind Hannibal, the shuffling of no doubt another rotund car ‘expert’, made Hannibal turn around, back to the poor receptionist with brow furrowed in sickness. The sight that greeted him would be one he would never recover from.

There was Will, 19 and blossoming. He just knew,in his marrow _in his molecules_ , that the exquisitely beautiful fae-like creature in front of him was undeniably, unselfconsciously, the best looking, the best smelling, no doubt the best tasting thing in this town, Baltimore, the world. “Ruby,” spoke Saint Sebastian, tied to the tree, Hannibal’s eyes providing the arrows, voice lowering like a demure lamb, “is that the owner of the black one?” Hannibal turned around, confident, tall, shoulders down and wide, attempting his best peacock impression. For others this would be wasted. Hannibal wasn’t sure what divine purpose was presenting itself, but there was no way he was letting this boy (his mind curled protectively, hungrily, around that word, _boy_ ) get away. “That would be me,” Hannibal said, his accent thicker in his excitement, and, by the look in the boy’s eye, more unexpected, perhaps sensual. “How is the car?”  
Stepping closer, Will was nervous. He didn’t play well with others, only his friends and family, and especially not with his elders. This guy...there was something there. A tendril of black smoke, not opaque but dark, still. He was, for lack of a better word, the hottest guy Will had ever seen. He was kind of weird looking, sure (Will had always liked them interesting, anyway) but incredible. Striking. Focussed. It was as though all of his features were pointing in Will’s direction. All that attention was breath taking, shake-making. He had to talk back, though. Crap. “The uh- the car is OK. Got a little oil in the...” he babbled on, lost himself in the design. Hannibal wasn’t listening. He was staring. His senses could only take so much effortless perfection. “…so it’ll be here for a couple of days, you’ll need to leave it with me and I’ll look after her.” He wasn’t talking anymore. “Oh, that is a shame. I live in Baltimore and I really need to get there tonight. Do you know any good hotels?” “Hotels?” Will asked, their town was less than 50 miles away... “You’re so close. If you can’t get a cab I’m sure someone will offer you a ride.” Me, me, ride with me and only me, thought Will. Crap. That had sounded vaguely like an offer.  
The driver had crinkles by his eyes when he smiled. It was attractive. It was the realest emotion Hannibal had expressed in months. “Is that an offer?” he asked, aware in his periphery that at some point, receptionist Ruby had stepped away from her desk.  
“When do you get off...” he stepped closer, ostensibly to get his name from the dirty overalls, but really more a matter for the senses“...Will?”  
He smelt wonderful. Boyish, like woods, shyness, like the blooming redness of his apple-sweet cheeks. Perfect.

He couldn’t bear for one more second to pass without telling Will who he was. Will, William, God he would enjoy that.

“My name is Hannibal Lecter. Thank you for trying to fix my car” he said, making an approximation of what he hoped was a smile. He could smell the excitement. Will almost smelt wet with it.  
“Umm...like soon?” Will replied, so hopelessly lost in bottomless brown/green and somehow maroon eyes that he had lost all ability to think straight. “Like, now?” Hannibal laughed, stepping away, playing it cool, pulling it back, teasing. Will’s lopsided puppy-cute coquettish smile, trusting in spite of his obvious nervousness…God…

He had to calm down.  
He was in danger now.  
Curls like that would make a devil of him.

“Well actually I kind of have to stay. I’m on the late shift so I have to lock up, and since I’m fixing your car I might even have to stay later.” Will shifted from foot to foot, God he was so nervous it pained him.

“I see. Would it help you work if I went and had a cup of coffee? I’m sure you don’t want a stuffy guy like me...” Hannibal was trying very hard to sound unaffected, to sound the same way other people sound, so sound like that girl before ( _God what was her name, he couldn’t even remember it now_ “...hanging around and asking you what a wrench is for.” He let himself smile again. Tried it out. Will seemed soothed, so he continued “I could always come back later, say around 19:00?”

Will gulped. He hoped he was reading this right. Being without his uncanny knack for empathy was weird. Usually it felt like he could sense what people were going to say and do before they said/did it, but with this guy (Hannibal, he let that roll around in his head like a breaking wave in a storm) it was all closed. He had no idea. It was a mystery. Now though, was Hannibal propositioning him? Was that it? Will really hoped so. Out of the numerous, numerous fantasies he’d had (not all of them involved death but some did, God he was a freak) since he was 14 and wanton, rubbing himself in to his Spiderman sheets for any friction, he’d never gotten round to the older man thing.

“O-OK. Sounds good. Lets uh, yeah that’ll be fine. Knock real loud, otherwise I won’t hear. I might be servicing - I mean uh, under the hood.” Will felt mortified. He had just punned.  
“Excellent, see you at 19:00, then.” Hannibal reached in to his pocket, fished around for show “Here is my card if there any problems.” Sleek, refined, stylish, Hannibal knew Will would be impressed, and he was rewarded with the crinkling of forehead, the look of wide eyed adolescence. Adolescence, Hannibal thought with an almightily satisfied shudder The boy probably isn’t even 21 yet.

“Until later then, William”

“See you at seven,” Will glanced down at the card, “Doctor Lecter.”


End file.
